Tuesday, August 4, 2009

faculty furloughs

I do love it. Suddenly the administration is going to have to say out loud and on paper and in the press that a significant part of our labor involves classroom preparation, grading, and research and that it gets carried out on days we do not step foot into a lecture hall. This, in order to 1) make sure no one takes a furlough day on a day they are scheduled to teach and 2) justify to us and the union that a non-teaching day is a "work" day and therefore legit as a furlough day.

4 comments:

We had furloughs here in Ontario during the 90s. (They called them "Rae Days" after the then-premier who rolled back wages of all public-sector employees.)

What I found maddening was that other faculty members were the least likely to recognize one's furlough day. If most took Wednesday as their furlough day and you had Monday as your non-teaching day to cover the decreed furlough, too bad for you when it was time to schedule committee meetings!

As you say, at least the administration will recognize the work that goes on during non-teaching days. The public probably never will, though!

It's all a big mess. And I'm so absolutely uninspired to develop my fall syllabi as the administration has yet to formalize the process whereby we request furlough days (and have them approved by our Dean).

Apparently, we are also going to have to sign some document certifying that we will not work on furlough days. I guess that might get me out of a few committee meetings. Sheesh.

ItPF, I agree. So, this semester I'm going to request that 4 of my 8furlough days be taken on instructional days. I've thought about this for a long time. I teach a 4-day week this semester, and if I don't furlough myself on some of those days, that would mean that I'd only have 2 Fridays p/mo. to dedicate solely to research/writing--which of course goes on into the weekend (I'm not one of these sorts who can sit down and pound out a few pages in a free hour here or there. Alas.) So, we shall see. I also have loads of service commitments that relate to other people's promotions or course proposals, etc. It's going to be SO much fun trying to schedule meetings.